by Peter James
‘We were meant to be going to a luncheon and he’d gone fishing, promising to be back early. It seems he lost his watch. It had belonged to his father who’d been presented with it after the battle of Jutland and was of great sentimental value. He’d been a commander too.’ She drank a mouthful of gin and swallowed as if it were fuel. ‘He’d asked someone to pop down and tell me, just like you did, that he’d be late.’ She blinked twice and smiled wanly. ‘He was a fit man, never had any problems with his ticker before. I found him on the bank a couple of hours later. The doctor said he must have been dead for at least an hour by then.’
Charley felt icy mist swirling inside her. ‘Has — anyone — ever — seen him — before?’
‘No. About a year afterwards I went to see one of these spiritualist people — a medium — but nothing came through. I hoped to find out if there was anything he had wanted to say.’ She gulped some more gin. ‘That thunderstorm yesterday,’ she went on. ‘Perhaps it was something to do with the atmospherics … Still, it’s jolly good to have some young blood in the lane,’ she said, trying to brighten her face, to swallow her tears. ‘We have a charity cricket match Sunday week, for the NSPCC. Don’t suppose you could bake a couple of cakes?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She wanted to keep the conversation about Mrs Letter’s husband going, but could not think what to say.
‘Have you met everyone else in the lane?’
‘I think so.’
‘Delightful couple at the top in that rather vulgar house, Julian and Zoe Garfield-Hamsden. And Hugh Boxer, my neighbour in the barn. He’s a dear. A brilliant man but a bit loopy.’ She tapped her head. ‘All these university professors are. Spends half his time wandering round with a couple of coat hangers looking for ley lines or some rubbish. Cheers!’ She drained her glass.
‘You have some nice paintings,’ Charley said to fill the silence.
‘My husband did several of them. He loved this part of the world and painted a lot locally.’
‘I thought they looked familiar.’
‘There’s one that would interest you upstairs. I’ll get it in a minute. It’s a very nice one of Elmwood Mill.’ She studied her glass, the crab eyes blinking slowly.
‘Did you know Nancy Delvine?’ Charley asked.
‘No. Not at all.’
‘What did she die of?’
‘A stroke.’
‘Had she been in hospital for a long time?’
‘Hospital, dear?’ The old woman looked at her. ‘No, it was in the house. I found her. In the kitchen.’
Charley’s mind raced aimlessly. She remembered the elusiveness on the estate agent’s face. Here? In the house? Mr Budley’s voice. Oh no, I don’t believe so.
‘Was she married?’
Viola Letters stood, rather hastily Charley thought. ‘Can I get you a top up?’
‘No, thank you. I’ve still got —’
The woman took the glass out of her hand. ‘You haven’t got a drop in that, not a drop.’ She refilled Charley’s glass and brought it back to her, brimming.
Charley gazed at it in horror. ‘It’s really a bit —’ But the old woman had already set it down beside her and was on her way back to the cabinet. ‘Thank you.’
Viola Letters splashed angostura into her gin and stirred it noisily. Charley’s nose dipped involuntarily towards her sherry. She was feeling decidedly blotto.
‘Dick loved the countryside. He was quite a sensitive old thing really, although they used to say he was tough in the Navy. I’ll go and get that picture.’
Charley heard her walk up the stairs then across the floor above. The terrier yelped again, sorry for itself rather than angry now. She thought of the face in the photograph, the man yesterday in the woods. Tom had laughed at her dismissively, told her what she had told Viola Letters — that she must have mistaken what the man had said. But she had known in her heart she could not have mistaken everything. Not the name Letters, and the watch, and the address.
She hadn’t told Tom about the gum. She knew he would have been even more scornful about that.
Viola Letters came back into the room holding a small framed painting. ‘This is it.’
Charley took the painting. It was an oil of Elmwood Mill viewed from behind the bridge. The quality was good, clear, the detail immaculate. She studied the house and the mill, noticing its roof was in better condition than now. The picture blurred suddenly and she screwed up her eyes, trying to focus. Something was wrong, odd, different.
‘When did he do this?’ she asked, her voice trembling.
‘Golly, now you’re asking. He died in nineteen fifty-three, so before then, of course. Before the fire.’
Charley stared again, the picture shaking so much in her hands it was hard to see clearly. She tried to compose herself, to concentrate, brought it close to her face, stared harder, harder, at the building on the level patch of ground beyond the barn, the other side of the mill race, halfway up the bank. A large smart stable block.
The stable block that was missing.
Chapter Twelve
Beldale Avenue reminded Charley of the street in Finchley where she’d spent her early childhood, before her adoptive father had died and they’d had to move. A quiet south London backwash of unassuming semidetached houses with pebbledash walls. Tidy. Orderly. Two delivery men were unloading a new washing machine from a yellow van. A mother pushed a baby in a pram. Three children raced each other down the pavement on BMX bikes.
She was surprised by the ordinariness. She had been expecting something different, although she did not know what. Something more secretive, sinister.
Number 39 had soup-brown walls, secondary double glazing and an almost smugly neat front garden presided over by a ceramic gnome with a grin on its face like an infant that has just dumped in its nappy. An old estate car was parked outside sagging on its springs, the rear window plastered with faded pennants of English counties.
As she ground through the traffic, Charley resented being in London again. She parked on the shaded side of the street and locked the Citroën with the windows open and the roof partially rolled back for Ben, who barked in protest at being left.
Tom had been as dismissive about Mrs Letters’s husband as about everything else. It was Charley’s mistaken identity, Viola Letters’s wishful thinking, an imagined resemblance to an old faded photograph. ‘Ghosts glide down corridors of houses late at night, rattling chains. They don’t wander through woods at eleven in the morning carrying fishing rods,’ he had said.
He had been equally dismissive about the stables. All old houses had stables, he had said. Elmwood Mill was bound to have had some.
They had worked on the house together over the weekend. Between them they had finished stripping the walls of the bedroom and decided on the colour. Tom had favoured Wedgewood blue. Charley thought that might feel cold in winter. They agreed on magnolia, then started on the largest spare room, which had been Nancy Delvine’s workroom and would now become Tom’s study. They had decided to leave the downstairs until after Tom’s birthday party.
A curtain parted above her and she hesitated, tempted to go back to her car and drive off. It was Laura who had persuaded her to come. Or maybe she had persuaded herself. She did not know. Fear rippled through her, fear and curiosity and something else she did not understand. She felt clammy, too, and had the metallic taste in her mouth again. Her watch said 12.05. She was five minutes late.
Ernest Gibbon had not sounded how she had expected over the phone. No drama, no Flavia Montessore theatricals. He had not sounded anything much at all, other than a man who had been interrupted in the middle of the cricket match on the television. She had phoned him on Friday afternoon after speaking to Laura, and had been surprised he had been able to fit her in straight away on Monday morning.
The bell rang with a single chime and a tall, ponderous man in his late fifties opened the door. He was accompanied by a smell of boiled cabbage which made her nausea worse.
‘Mr Gibbon?’ she said.
He had a hangdog face, with droopy flesh that disappeared each side of his chin into mutton chop sideburns, and limp black hair that was centre-parted and a little too long, giving him a Dickensian air. He looked down at her through eyes distorted by the dense lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses. His dark suit had seen better days and his tartan tie was knotted too tightly, making the points of his shirt collar stick up slightly, and in spite of the heat he wore a cardigan. She glanced out of habit at his shoes. Her mother had told her you could always judge a man by his shoes. He was wearing wine-coloured corduroy carpet slippers.
‘Yes. Mrs Witney?’ he intoned in a flat, soporific voice that had no trace of emotions; he might have used the same tone to comment about the weather or to concur with a complaint about the punctuality of trains.
He held the door until she was inside, then closed it firmly. Unease rose inside her as he slid the safety chain across.
The hallway had a bright orange and brown patterned carpet; a porcelain spanish donkey in a straw hat was on a copper trolley in front of her. On the wall above it was a wooden crucifix.
‘I’m afraid it’s at the top.’ She detected a faint wheeze after he spoke, as if he had a slight touch of emphysema, and as they climbed the staircase the wheezing became more distinct. ‘Come far, have you?’
‘From Sussex.’
Wooden plates with scenes of Switzerland relieved the grim Artex stair walls. He paused on the landing to get his breath. On this floor the house had a tired old smell, a milder version of the way Elmwood smelled at the moment, and it depressed her. Her stomach fluttered uncomfortably and she felt increasingly nervous, part of her wanting to pay him now, pay him for his time and go, forget about it.
He walked a few paces down the landing, opened a door and put his head in. ‘My client’s turned up, mother. You’ll have to make your own tea. I’ve put your lunch out in the kitchen for you, and locked the front door if you have to answer it. See you later. Cheerio.’
Psycho. There was no mother. It was all an act.
Christ, calm down!
Ernest Gibbon climbed the next flight, the stairs creaking under his heavy plod, and then a third into a spartanly furnished attic room with the same orange and brown carpeting as the rest of the house. There was a divan with a microphone on a stalk above it, an office chair on castors and an untidy stack of hi-fi equipment and wiring. It was hot and stuffy.
‘Lie down on the couch, please,’ he said. ‘Make yourself comfortable. Take off your shoes, loosen anything that’s tight.’ His instructions sounded as if he were reading out a shopping list.
She pushed off her white flats. ‘Could we have the window open a little?’
‘You’ll find you’ll cool down soon enough. Your body temperature will drop very low.’ He went out and came back with a folded blanket which he put on the divan. Everything at the same unhurried pace. He walked across to the window, drew the flimsy curtains and the room darkened.
‘Have you ever been regressed before, Mrs Witney?’
She stretched out, feeling awkward, regretting she had taken off her shoes because it made her feel more vulnerable. The pillow was lumpy. ‘Yes, once.’
‘My fee is thirty-five pounds if we’re successful, fifteen if we’re not. One in eight fail to regress. It will take two hours and we should get two or three previous lives on the first occasion. They are normally between thirty or three hundred years apart.’ Another shopping list.
She glanced up at the microphone over her face masked in grey foam rubber. The divan smelled of vinyl.
‘I tape each session and give you a copy. It’s included in the price. Make yourself comfortable. It’s important you are comfortable as you are going to be staying in the same position for a long time.’
Psycho. She felt a flash of panic. The mother was a rotting skeleton. He was going to … then she heard the sound of a lavatory flushing below and relaxed a little.
‘Is there anything you’d like to ask me before we begin? I can see that you are nervous.’ He busied himself with his recording equipment, sorting out a tangle of wires. ‘It is natural to be nervous. Going back into past lives means that we are opening up Pandora’s boxes deep inside us.’
‘Do all people have previous lives?’
He continued untangling the wires. ‘Jesus Christ existed before he came to earth. He told us, “Before Abraham was, I am.” The Bible has many mentions. Christianity is founded on life everlasting. In my Father’s house there are many mansions. In our own lives are buried many past lives.’ He pulled out a jackplug and pushed it into a different socket. ‘Our present carnations are part of an ongoing process. Some people have deep traumas carried from previous lives. When they understand the cause, the traumas go.’ He removed the wrapping on a new cassette, wrote slowly on the outside, then looked up at her. ‘Do you have a particular trauma? A fear of anything?’
‘Heights, I suppose.’
‘You probably died in a fall in a previous life. We’ll find it.’
The simplicity of his comment made her suspicious. It was too pat.
He pushed the cassette into the machine. ‘Do you have a special reason for wanting to be regressed, Mrs Witney?’
‘I — I’ve been getting a feeling of déjà vu about somewhere.’
‘You feel as if you’ve been there before?’
She hesitated. ‘Yes.’
He adjusted a flickering sound level light. ‘Sometimes we access trace memories passed down through genes. Sometimes we transcend time. Sometimes we connect into the spirit world. The important thing is to feel free. Relax. Enjoy yourself. If there is anything uncomfortable or threatening you must tell me.’
‘Why?’
The hypnotist pressed a button. There was a click and a loud whine. His voice and her own repeated: ‘… or threatening you must tell me.’ ‘Why?’
He pressed another button and she heard the shuffling of the tape rewinding, then another click. He stooped to inspect the machine. ‘Because you’ll be reliving all that happens. It will feel very real. Pain will feel real. Danger will feel real. It will be real.’ He stood up. ‘Comfy, are you? Get your hands comfy too.’
Charley wriggled around and he gently laid the blanket over her. ‘I shall be putting you into an altered state of consciousness. You won’t be asleep, but it will seem like it. When you come out you’ll feel like you do after a nice Sunday lunch; lazy and relaxed.’ He allowed the merest hint of a smile to show on his face for the first time, and it made him seem more human, made her feel safer. He walked ponderously over to the door and turned a dial on the wall.
The overhead light went out and a much dimmer red light came on. The hypnotist coughed and sat in the chair beside her. A train went by in the distance and he paused as if waiting for it to pass, then leaned towards her.
‘Tell me your first name.’
‘Charley.’
‘I want you to look at the microphone. Concentrate on the microphone. Blank everything out of your mind except the microphone, Charley.’
She stared at it for a long time, aware of the silence, waiting for him to speak, waiting for something to happen. The silence continued. The microphone slipped out of focus, turned into two, then back into one. She wondered how long she had been looking at it. A minute? Two minutes? Five? Another train went by.
‘Velvet, Charley. I want you to think of velvet, soft velvet all around. You are in a tent of velvet. Your eyes are feeling heavy. Everything is soft, Charley.’ His voice droned, the tone unaltering. ‘You are safe.’
She tried to imagine being in a cocoon of velvet.
‘How old are you, Charley?’
The banality of the question surprised her. She glanced at him, saw the frown of disapproval, then looked back at the microphone. ‘Thirty-six.’
‘Close your eyes now. Think back to your thirtieth birthday. Can you remember what you did on your thirtieth birthday?’
/> She racked her brains. Thirty. Yes, she could remember that one, would never forget it. She opened her mouth, but it was difficult to speak; she had to strain to get the words out; they came out slowly, sounding slurred, almost as if someone else was speaking them.
Tom had taken her to dinner to a new Italian restaurant in Clapham to celebrate. They’d had a row, one of their worst rows ever, and Tom had stormed out of the restaurant, leaving her to pay the bill. She could feel the burning embarrassment now, six years later, could see the faces of the other diners, a woman with long blonde hair studying her disdainfully from across the restaurant as if she was an exhibit in a zoo, whispering to her dinner companions and the whole table chortling with laughter. Then it got even worse. When she opened her handbag and found she had not brought her purse. The manager had not let her leave, had locked the restaurant door and stood guard over her while she called Tom.
‘Did he come back?’
‘Yes.’
The microphone seemed to nod at her sympathetically.
‘Go back in time, Charley. Go back to your twenty-first birthday. Can you remember your twenty-first birthday?’
Her eyelids drooped. She forced them open. Slowly they closed again and she felt herself sinking down through a soft darkness towards sleep. ‘Camping.’ The word seemed heavy. It rolled out of her mouth and dropped away into an abyss. ‘Tom and I. In Wales. The Brecon Beacons. It rained and the fire wouldn’t light. Had champagne … a bottle of champagne in the tent. We were giggling and it collapsed. That’s when he proposed to me.’
‘Go back to sixteen now, Charley. Feel sixteen.’
Silence.
‘You are sixteen. Look down at yourself, tell me what you are wearing.’
‘A red miniskirt. White boots.’
‘How is your hair?’
‘It’s long.’
‘Do you like being sixteen?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m going out with Tom.’
‘Are you going out tonight?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you going to do?’
